If you go back a few years, there was a large hysteria across much of the Eurozone about German domination of the bloc. Magazine cover after magazine cover painting them in terrible light, including some going so far as to reference back to Nazi times.
That coincided with the post effects of the great recession, when Germany essentially refused to allow more liberal central bank posturing and action to try to follow the more aggressive US Fed lead on how to properly respond to the terrible recession and the financial system consequences. Germany wanted a very restrictive, conservative approach. There was a split at that point between the members that were suffering and Germany which was in mostly solid shape (the peak of the Greek disaster was also near a peak of the anti-German sentiment).
The US recovery took root relatively quickly, after about a year, thanks in part to the Fed taking aggressive action to stabilize the banks and financial system (the US would have seen Citi, Bank of America, etc. all collapse otherwise; those banks are now extremely healthy and printing massive profits again). It was only when the ECB finally copied the Fed's approach that the broad EU and Eurozone economies began to rapidly recover (and for those already in good shape, it has pushed them into something closer to economic boom). You can look at a chart of EU or Eurozone economic growth, you'll see a nasty double recessionary dip around 2011-2012. After that, the ECB finally began to shift its behavior and do what they should have done years prior, which has led to a sustained recovery in most parts of the EU since then (you see it in meaningfully increased growth rates, from Finland finally recovering after a disastrous 8-10 years, to Spain and Portugal finally seeing serious improvement, to German growth picking up, to French unemployment finally declining significantly, etc).
> there was a large hysteria across much of the Eurozone about German domination of the bloc. Magazine cover after magazine cover painting them in terrible light, including some going so far as to reference back to Nazi times.
I try to keep up with politics and news and saw none of this (I watch foreign TV but don't read foreign newspapers a lot). So I don't think there has been a lot of painting germany as a bad guy in Swedish media, no. Why that is, I can only speculate. Would be interesting to hear if the same is true in e.g. Denmark, Finland.
> That coincided with the post effects of the great recession, when Germany essentially refused to allow more liberal central bank posturing and action to try to follow the Fed lead on how to properly respond to the terrible recession and the financial system consequences
If the 2008 recession was behind it, Sweden recovered very quickly and wasn't as hard hit (Partly because we weren't as influenced by ECB interest rate politics). Perhaps that is also a reason.
> So I don't think there has been a lot of painting germany as a bad guy in Swedish media, no
I think you have to consider that would very likely be because Sweden isn't in the Euro. For example there has been widespread blame in Finland, that their protracted economic suffering was from being unable to control their own currency to respond better to their long recessionary environment.
It keeps going for a hundred more stories like those. If you dig into local Greek, Spanish, Italian, French, British media over those couple of years, Germany is largely the villain of the Eurozone economic crisis. You'd even see it represented constantly on media sites like Imgur.
That coincided with the post effects of the great recession, when Germany essentially refused to allow more liberal central bank posturing and action to try to follow the more aggressive US Fed lead on how to properly respond to the terrible recession and the financial system consequences. Germany wanted a very restrictive, conservative approach. There was a split at that point between the members that were suffering and Germany which was in mostly solid shape (the peak of the Greek disaster was also near a peak of the anti-German sentiment).
The US recovery took root relatively quickly, after about a year, thanks in part to the Fed taking aggressive action to stabilize the banks and financial system (the US would have seen Citi, Bank of America, etc. all collapse otherwise; those banks are now extremely healthy and printing massive profits again). It was only when the ECB finally copied the Fed's approach that the broad EU and Eurozone economies began to rapidly recover (and for those already in good shape, it has pushed them into something closer to economic boom). You can look at a chart of EU or Eurozone economic growth, you'll see a nasty double recessionary dip around 2011-2012. After that, the ECB finally began to shift its behavior and do what they should have done years prior, which has led to a sustained recovery in most parts of the EU since then (you see it in meaningfully increased growth rates, from Finland finally recovering after a disastrous 8-10 years, to Spain and Portugal finally seeing serious improvement, to German growth picking up, to French unemployment finally declining significantly, etc).